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Dr. Homa Hoodfar, a highly respected university professor at Concordia University, Montreal has been arrested and detained in Iran's notorious Evin prison on Monday 6, June 2016. She is an anthropologist who conducts ethnographic research across the Middle East, as well on Muslims living in the West.

‘The new criminal proceedings against Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe are as baseless as the original ones’ - Kerry Moscogiuri

Responding to news from Richard Ratcliffe that his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe - a British-Iranian charity worker who has been unjustly jailed in Iran for the past year-and-a-half - may be facing additional criminal charges and a further prison sentence, Amnesty International UK’s Campaigns Director, Kerry Moscogiuri, said:

Last week’s decision by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to charge British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe with plotting to overthrow the regime when she had been told she was about to be released seems particularly cruel and arbitrary. It is also an alarming development for another woman of dual nationality currently held incommunicado in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison.

A Turkish journalist has been sentenced to 20 months in jail and stripped of legal rights over her children for breaching the confidentiality of a court case, her lawyer said on Wednesday, raising further concern about deteriorating press freedoms.

Arzu Yildiz was sued by the state after publishing footage in May 2015 from a court hearing at which four prosecutors were on trial for ordering a search of trucks belonging to Turkey's MIT intelligence agency as they traveled to Syria in 2014.

Last week - we were alarmed by news from our sisters in Nazra Feminist Studies in Egypt about the summoning of their staff by the Egyptian court for their alleged breach of the controversial law on receiving "foreign funding". This is just one of a series of events of what seems to be an orchestrated clampdown on Egyptian human rights organisations and which could cripple their activities in defending the rights of others.

A court is expected to rule on the asset freeze ordered against two prominent human rights defenders: Gamal Eid, a lawyer who heads